What I do find interesting, though, is when that kind of status is bestowed on others out of respect, or as an accident of timing. Take, for instance, the URL syntax for an actor on IMDB. Here’s the one for Philip Baker Hall:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001311/

Apparently Philip was the 1,311th actor entered into their database. Who do you think would pop up if you replaced those last four digits with ‘0001’? Take a minute to guess, then click to find the answer:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000001/

Not too big of a surprise, I guess. Dig a little deeper and you’ll see that his #1 status may only partially be due to favoritism, and partially to alphabetical priority. Number 1 through 82 (composer Victor Young) are all members of Hollywood’s elite, in alpha order. So, okay, Fred’s not necessarily their favorite, just in an 82-way tie for first. Still respectable.

How about movies? Movies on IMDB have their own ID category. Here’s the link for Hudson Hawk:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102070/

Replace those digits with 000001, and you get…

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0000001/

That’s Carmencita, a one-minute movie made in 1894. The description takes longer to read than the movie does to watch: “Performing on what looks like a small wooden stage, wearing a dress with a hoop skirt and white high-heeled pumps, Carmencita does a dance with kicks and twirls, a smile always on her face.” Okay, one of the first movies ever made. Makes sense it’d be #0000001.

So now I’m hooked, and beginning to reconsider my snotty attitude on the hyper-coolness of being #1. I couldn’t help but dig around my bookmarks and frequently visited sites, and come up with a bunch of sites that use a similar ID-based syntax for their URLs. The interestingness of the following list of number ones will vary based on your tolerance of the mundane and trivial. (Mine = off the charts.)

Board Game Geek
Entry #1 on BGG is a game I’ve never heard of called Die Macher, released in 1986. It seems plenty favored by the Board Game Geekers, with a 8.1 rating out of 10. It’s not the highest-rated game on there, but it’s pre-Settlers of Catan, so maybe it was the highest when the database was set up.

Fun meta-game for BGG-surfing: try to find the oldest game on there. The earliest date I’ve found is 200 A.D., the supposed release date of Backgammon.

Metafilter
No revelation here, since Matt links to it every July 14, but the #1 post on MeFi is a link to cat-scan.com, “one of the strangest sites [mathowie’s] ever seen.” It’s heartening to consider what passed for strange in our halcyon pre-Goatse days.

Cooking.com
If you’re setting up a cooking database and had to pick a recipe to enter first, you’d probably go with your favorite breakfast dish, too. In this case it’s Classic Omelets with Fines Herbes and Toato Concass. Being the first entry, its fame was quickly eclipsed by newer, trendier dishes, and as such it’s never gotten a single rating. Perhaps no one has access to chervil. Fear not, little dish, give me a weekend, and I’ll rescue you from the dark caverns of the unrated.

Twitter
It’s not possible to search just on twitter ID, so I couldn’t find #1. I was able to find the first tweets of Twitter founders Biz and Ev (posts #21 and #28, repsectively), both of whom sum up the early twitter gestalt perfectly, as their first messages are exactly the same: “just setting up my twttr”.

TinyURL
The URL-shrinking service TinyURL has been around since 2002, so I was a little surprised to find that the site first shortened by it was still online. Type in tinyurl.com/1, and you’ll end up at gilby.com, the “home of Gilby Productions,” a site dedicated to unicycling and the promotion thereof. Amusingly, the TinyURL address—a URL meant to be a shortcut to the final destination—is actually longer than “gilby.com”.

Bonus TinyURL nerdery
A generated TinyURL is constructed of a seemingly random assortment of numbers and letters. Which means that on occasion, the URL ID is going to spell out a word. It took me a number of tries to land on something that didn’t redirect to a 404, but I’m happy to report that if you’re ever looking for the Microsoft Exchange Server Mailbox Merge Wizard, your life just got a lot easier. All you need to remember is this: http://tinyurl.com/poop.

Recently I’ve taken up jogging at the gym. When I jog outside, it’s takes the littlest amount of brainpower to determine how far to run—just set a point B, run there, turn around, then run back to point A. In the gym, it’s several steps more difficult, because I’m on a track, and points A & B are the same, and I pass them dozens of times in a given session.

At my gym, one lap = 1/12 of a mile. Which means, as I run, I need to store a variable in my brain that can have one of twelve different states. This is, to my surprise, remarkably difficult to do. I’m not sure if it’s the adrenaline, or elevated heart rate, or the seven TVs I pass on each go-round, but the simple task of incrementing a number every 45 seconds has proven to be an unreliable method of keeping track of my progress.

So I considered my options. Without a buddy at a stationary point outside the track keeping score for me, I had to rely on just me and my brain. Simple counting wasn’t working; I clearly needed another trigger. I first went for tactile. Instead of incrementing a number in my head on each lap, I extended the relevant number of fingers, then pressed them against my body—somewhere in my midsection, which had the added benefit of reminding me with every soft tap what was bringing me here. (see ¶1, “gut feeling”). The idea being that physical touch would inbue the variable in my brain with more meaning and make it easier to access. This worked for about one session, then I started to lose track again. The feeling of four fingers pressing against my side turns out to be roughly the same as three fingers. Time for Plan C.

I needed something more than tactile. I needed something physical, something whose state existed beyond my own memory and could be accessed at any time. Turns out I had the perfect instrument: my wedding ring.

By moving my ring from one finger to the next as I progress around the track, I’m now able to store the operative piece of information in a physical object, outside my brain. There’s no chance of forgetting or misremembering it. All I’m required to remember now is an action: move the ring from one finger to the next as I cross a certain point. It’s a much simpler task for my exhausted mind.

There’s a pleasant coincidence of design here as well. Because I have ten fingers and because each mile has twelve laps, my ring has to start over upon reaching lap eleven. Two laps later, after finishing the full mile, my ring is on digit number two (12 mod 10), which happens to be its home base, i.e. my ring finger. Meaning, if I’m feeling partcularly lethargic, there is no longer a need even to remember how many total laps I’m working toward—if I look down and see my ring somewhere it doesn’t belong… I just keep on running.

Where most men merely use their wedding bands as a timeless symbol of love and everlasting devotion, I’ve imbued mine with extra special mathematical powers. This is not the least bit surpising.